The Society's Violence and Creativity Series
Posted: 14,01,2009
The Society is delighted to present four talks on the theme of violence and creativity in which we have invited a number of speakers, experienced Jungian Analysts and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, to address the problem of violence both within the consulting room and without, and approach an understanding of the process by which creative healing can emerge from destructiveness.
Klein wrote at the beginning of the Second World War that the “phantasy-building”* of early infancy results in the now familiar splitting according to whether immediate gratification of need is satisfied or not, in which the breast of mother is imbued with the characteristics of good and evil. The resulting processes of projection and introjection, in which the persecutory fear of retaliation in response to destructive impulses towards the hostile breast will, if all goes well in the infant-mother relationship, result in the depressive position where guilt, reparation and love become possible.
Is violence and our collective preoccupation with it a failure of this process, or part of it? Is it a question of, as Jung said twenty years later, in relation to the deification of the State and dictator as a defensive idealisation, Naturam expellas ferca tamen usque recurret (You can throw out Nature with a pitchfork, but she’ll always turn up again)**? The capacity to be creative, to transcend our woundedness, have their roots in this early process, and the struggle between these opposing forces is the backdrop to this series. The variety of perspectives in these five talks will provide fascinating food for thought. We hope you will join us.
* Klein, M. (1936), Weaning, in Love, Guilt and Reparation and other works 1921-1945, Virago Press Limited 1988
** Jung, C.G. (1957), The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future), in Jung, Selected Writings, introduced by Anthony Storr, Fontana Press, 1983.
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